


That's What You've Heard (However, I Wish You Luck)

by scioscribe



Category: Community
Genre: Alternate Universe, Episode: s01e01 Pilot, Episode: s03e19 Curriculum Unavailable, Friendship, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-16
Updated: 2012-09-16
Packaged: 2017-11-14 09:27:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,227
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/513761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Greendale really is a psychiatric hospital, but Abed has a foolproof escape plan for him and all his friends.  Shared delusion?  Shared delusion?  Shared delusion?</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's What You've Heard (However, I Wish You Luck)

**Author's Note:**

> Besides the obvious reference to "Curriculum Unavailable," there are also a few callbacks to the pilot and other episodes.
> 
> Warnings for Pierce being Pierce, and pretty much everyone having a lack of sophistication in discussing their mental health issues. Also, Greendale is just as bad at being a psychiatric hospital as it is at being a community college.

“ _One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest_ ,” Abed said.

The blonde girl named after the water filter, the one who was always eating pieces of her own hair, looked up. She scratched the inside of her arm. “ _Girl, Interrupted_ ,” she said, almost shyly.

Abed scrutinized her. He said, “You look like Elizabeth Shue.”

The girl put her head down again. “Elizabeth Shue’s a fascist.”

*

The football player who sometimes gave Abed half of his dessert said, “ _The Attic Expeditions_.”

Abed hadn’t heard of it: it probably wasn’t a real movie.

“I saw it on, like, late, late night TV one time, and there were all these people with birdcages on their _faces_ , and bandages, and I think someone having sex.”

“In an attic? An attic’s not an asylum.”

“I think it turned out to _be_ an asylum, maybe? There were a lot of cameras. And Seth Green was in it.” He frowned. “Or maybe that was an episode of _Buffy_.”

He tried to give Abed half his Jell-O, but it slipped between his fingers.

He said, “Fumble,” and his eyes grew exceptionally wide.

Abed said, “Don’t cry.” He took a plastic spoon out of his pocket. “What good is it being crazy if you can’t eat off the floor?”

After his mom had left, his dad had made dinner one night and then thrown the casserole on the floor and broken the dish. Abed had been hungry and he didn’t want a sandwich because he’d had a sandwich for lunch, and dinner was supposed to be real food. He’d gone and sat on the kitchen floor and eaten the casserole until he’d accidentally cut his mouth on the glass.

This was better, because Greendale didn’t use glass.

“Here,” he said, and handed the spoon over.

The football player said, “You’re really cool, Abed.” Then, “Mm, it tastes like a Scratch-n-Sniff marker!”

*

“Ooh, _Patch Adams_ ,” the mother said. She wasn’t his mother, but sometimes Abed liked to pretend. She gave him a Band-Aid the time he had to say he ran into the door when he actually ran into an orderly’s fist. It turned out later that it was actually a chewing gum wrapper, but they had both been on the little pink pills then, and the little pink pills made everything seem like exactly what you said it was. Abed missed them.

“Only at the beginning,” Abed said. Still, he wrote it down. “Thanks, Shirley.”

She said, “You remembered my name!”

“I’m making everyone fictional,” he said. “I can always remember people when they don’t exist.”

*

The lawyer said, “ _Silence of the Lambs_. And the chick one.”

“ _Girl, Interrupted_?”

“No, the other one. Only Britta likes _Girl, Interrupted_. The horror one, with Halle Berry.”

Abed sharpened his crayon with his thumbnail. “ _Gothika_.”

“That’s it. I can’t believe you remember this stuff. What is this for, anyway?”

“ _Gothika_ ’s a good one,” Abed said.

“Obviously you thinking that is the reason you’re here. I’ll repeat: Abed, why are you collecting the names of movies about mental institutions?”

“I want to see how people escape,” Abed said. “How they deal with unstable psychological issues that have driven their lives to untenable extremes. The only problem is that most of the movies are about individuals, but if you escape on your own, then you’re just alone. You’d probably come right back.”

The lawyer said, “Aren’t you here voluntarily?”

“Define ‘voluntarily,’” Abed said.

“Um, _you can leave_? _Officially_?”

Abed said, “If I left, I’d be alone.”

The lawyer picked at his bathrobe like there was lint on the sleeve. Finally, he said, “If you want groups, you should extend your categories to high school movies. Every school’s a loony bin.”

“ _Ouch_ ,” Dr. Pelton said. “We prefer ‘rehabilitation facility.’”

“That’s for drugs,” Abed said.

Dr. Pelton put his hand on the lawyer’s chest.

*

The brunette girl who took all the pills and kept smoothing down her gown said there was a nice movie with Kevin Spacey.

“I can’t search IMDB for ‘nice movies with Kevin Spacey,’” Abed said. He couldn’t search IMDB at all. The computers they were allowed to use locked out every website except the local wilderness trail exhibits, for some reason. He was being sarcastic, but people never noticed that about him. “Do you remember anything else?”

“He might have been an alien,” she said. “Unless he wasn’t.”

Abed wrote, _w/ Kevin Spacey, poss. alien._

He said, “I’m trying to collate all known films with mental health institutions in them as either a main or a prominent setting.”

“That sounds like a final project,” the girl said. She shivered in a way that Abed associated with the early stages of orgasm. “Do you need any help?”

“I’ve talked to almost everyone I usually talk to,” Abed said. He reconsidered: “There was the one who wouldn’t talk to me because he thought I was a terrorist.”

“Pierce?”

“Is he old?”

The brunette nodded. “He still thinks we’re going to get electroshock therapy.”

“I wish. You could talk to him.”

*

“Annie says you’re not a terrorist,” the old man said.

“I’m not.”

“But you’re gathering information.”

Abed shrugged.

The old man said, “If you blow up this place, A-bed, promise you’ll take me with you.”

Abed thought about it. “Fine.”

“There’s a movie about monkeys.”

“ _12 Monkeys_ ,” Abed said.

“The hippies destroy the world,” Pierce said. “Always loved that movie.”

*

Abed gathered his friends together. Britta, Troy, Shirley, Jeff, Annie, and Pierce. He gave them character packets on themselves and on each other.

“The easiest way to escape a mental facility is by being insane,” Abed said. “Or having a lobotomy. Or time travel, or breaking a window, or dying, or being cured, or being transported out to help Jodie Foster fight crime. But those options are too unrealistic.”

“We can’t be cured?” Annie said tentatively.

Jeff snorted. “We can’t _break a window_?”

“The windows are all reinforced,” Abed said. “And I don’t know about you, but I think I have better odds of getting crazier than I have of getting sane. Pierce is close to dementia, Britta doesn’t know what a fascist is, Annie keeps pretending candy dots are Adderall, Jeff’s obsessed with official statuses, Shirley thinks the desk is an oven, and Troy cries when they wipe a smudge off the table.”

“I got very attached! …It was shaped like a butterfly.”

“And I won’t leave because I want to stay with people whose names I couldn’t consistently remember until I started pretending that we were all other people.”

“Yeah, I’d say the odds are good about the ‘not being cured’ part,” Jeff said.

Britta said, “You know you’re trying to text off the palm of your hand, right?”

“You know if you eat enough hair, it makes a ball inside your stomach, _right_?”

“Oh, that’s right. Whenever a woman gets uppity, just accuse her of having testicular envy.”

Troy said, “No one said anything like that.” He covered his crotch with one hand.

“Ever,” Annie said.

“Whatever,” Britta said. “Like you all know stuff. Jeff didn’t go to college, either!”

“None of us went to college,” Troy said.

“So that’s where we go,” Abed said. “Instead of here. We make up a college. It’ll have to be a community college, because otherwise I couldn’t afford tuition.”

“It’s make-believe, Abed,” Jeff said. “You can afford a limousine made of gold and a pony made out of tiny unicorns. And we’re not playing.”

But Shirley said, “If it were a community college, I could still go home to my family. My boys…”

“It’s okay, Shirley,” Pierce said. “I don’t see my family anymore, either. We’re the same.”

Shirley started crying louder.

“We’re not happy here,” Abed said. “We’d be happier somewhere else.”

“At a nonexistent community college,” Jeff said.

Annie said, “It could match the fake college you already went to. That way your degrees wouldn’t conflict.” She looked at Abed. “Could I have a pen? I don’t think I could take even fake classes with crayon.”

“Dr. Pelton said they’ll give us gel pens during select hours if we agree to further testing.”

“Joy,” Jeff said. “The pen problem is over. And I was worried the Yalta summit would get more done than this meeting.”

“It actually fits my plans that you’re being so reluctant,” Abed said. He checked his notes. “You’re going to continue to have trouble committing to the idea of Greendale Community College until later, when you’re going to have a series of epiphanies about family and belonging. And then forget them, and then have them again. There’s only one thing I’m worried about.”

“Bears,” Troy said automatically.

“No,” he said. He looked at his sheaf of notes on Troy. “That we won’t be friends anymore. You’re not going to be a football player in a psychiatric hospital anymore, you’re going to be a football player at a community college. And you have plumbing and air conditioning repair skill sets. The situation framing is different, you’ll be more popular. You might not like me anymore.”

“Abed, your notes are wrong,” Troy said. “Trust me. Nothing’s gone to stop us from being friends, not even make-believe sanity in a community college that doesn’t really exist.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Shirley said.

“This all sounds kind of gay,” Pierce said. “Are you sure Jeff didn’t think of it?”

“You want to trap me in a fictional world with _Pierce_ ,” Jeff said. “Have you really thought this through?” His face cramped. “Is it approved? Is it board certified? If the qualifications aren’t exactly right, everything can fall apart. Your _whole life_ can fall apart.”

“What kind of board would certify an attempted shared delusion?” Annie asked. “This isn’t really the same thing. You’ll be fine.” She rubbed Jeff’s shoulder.

“Dr. Pelton signed off as long as he gets to be in it.”

And as long as he got to interact a lot with Jeff. Abed thought it was best to keep that part under wraps for now.

“Shirley could see her kids,” he continued. “And we could falsely engineer certain situations so that Pierce could still be relevant. Annie would be able to take classes again, Jeff would actually have a real pretend phone to text people on, I already have an idea for how Troy can be an astronaut—”

“I get to be an astronaut?”

“—in an RV. But no spoilers. And don’t worry, I still have room for everyone to make character and plot adjustments as necessary. Especially to romance. We don’t want to lock ourselves into any corners.”

Troy nodded. “I hate corners.”

Abed pointed. “Shared delusion? Shared delusion? Shared delusion?”

Troy just did the handshake with him, wordlessly. Abed could feel himself starting to get emotional. He swallowed a few times and put on some chapstick. (Dr. Garrett didn’t always let him have chapstick because sometimes he ate it and sometimes he pretended it was a microphone, but Dr. Pelton gave it to him whenever Dr. Garrett wasn’t there. That was why Abed was fine with letting Dr. Pelton into his college. He would even make him a regular eventually.)

Britta took her hair out of her mouth. She said, “Can we take Spanish? I always wanted to learn Spanish.”

“Great,” Pierce said. “My first day at a delusional college and already the Mexicans have won.”

“Seriously, you want him in your head?” Jeff said.

“Does anyone speak Spanish?”

Annie had seen episodes of _Dora the Explorer_ while babysitting and Jeff knew how to say “please don’t scratch my car.”

“ _That’ll_ make for an interesting semester.”

“We can take Spanish,” Abed said. “We just have to manufacture a reason why we won't learn any.”

“That’s okay,” Troy said. “Britta wants to be the kind of person who takes a Spanish class more than she wants to learn Spanish anyway. And Spanish classes are cool, you get to eat tacos. And wear sombreros! Can there be sombreros?”

Abed wrote, _Sombreros._

Jeff stretched. “I suppose there are worse delusions than pretending to be at a community college. I can’t _think_ of any, but—”

“I want to have been going there longer than any of you!” Pierce said. “If it turns out to be cool, I want to be the one who started doing it first.”

Abed wrote, _Pierce=old_. “Okay.”

Annie said, “How do we start?”

Troy scrunched up his face. “I can feel myself getting crazier _already_.”

Abed said, “Greendale. Community college. We’re all in Spanish class together, but not now. We can figure out the Spanish later. We’re in the courtyard, listening to the school’s dean give a confusing speech.”

“Is the campus pretty?”

“Very.”

“Oh, that’s nice.”

Abed said, “Jeff wants to know what time it is.”

“What time _is_ it?” Jeff said. “What do they think we’re going to do with watches if they let us have them?”

It wasn’t really in-character, but Abed could trim out that part, leave out Jeff’s question entirely and just start with his own answer, in medias res, like all the great directors. The important thing wasn’t that they got everything right, they just had to stay together. He closed his eyes; took Troy’s hand and Annie’s, heard everyone else starting holding on, too. The table where they were sitting, it felt like it was magic. He would have to remember that for later.

Together, they made their escape.


End file.
